Seebach: Think tank project exists to please NEA

Published April 28, 2007 at midnight

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Last week I was a panelist on a discussion of the media, sponsored by the School of Education at the University of Colorado. It was organized by a former Rocky Mountain News reporter who is a graduate student there, and a faculty member, Kevin Welner.

The panel went well, I think, and Welner's questions were acute and perceptive. Along the way, though, he mentioned the "Think Tank Review Project," which he co-chairs with a faculty member from Arizona State University, Alex Molnar. The project is part of the Educational Policy Research Unit at ASU, and part of the Education and the Public Interest Center at CU-Boulder.

I was vaguely aware of the project because I get e-mails from them when they release a review of some research report from a think tank. But I really hadn't paid much attention because the first couple of times I clicked through to read a review, it was obviously just standard ed-school drivel, not worth more of my time. And I also knew that many of the people whose work on education I generally admire thought very poorly of the project because of its evident political slant.

Note that the ideological fault lines in education are not partisan per se, nor even "right" and "left," in principle. But people tend to align themselves along political axes, so it is useful shorthand to refer to their views in those terms.

After the formal discussion was over, I broached that subject with Welner. He said there is no intention on anyone's part to make the project political, and I have no reason to doubt his sincerity. He also said it's difficult to find expert reviewers on the right, and I don't doubt that either, given the political atmosphere in most ed schools.

Still, I urge you to go online and see how it has turned out, at epsl.asu.edu /epru/thinktankreview.htm. There are 16 reviews posted, and every one is about research published by think tanks that are right of center, and more specifically, that support greater parental choice in schools. Not all the research is about school choice, but a lot is. And the reviews are almost all highly negative.

Research from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute is the subject of four of the 16 reviews. One concerns a paper by Louisa Moats about whole language that was released in January. Some of the reviewer's claims had to be, um, "clarified," though that was done promptly and transparently. Still, Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the affiliated Fordham Foundation, calls the project "a witch hunt."

The project is indirectly funded by the National Education Association, which has raised some eyebrows. Welner explained by e-mail: "I have an approx. $30,000 subcontract with ASU's Education Policy Research Unit, to manage the think tank review project.

"According to EPRU director, Alex Molnar, funding for this project is provided by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice, a 501(c)(3) organization that receives funding from the NEA and from NEA affiliates in the Great Lakes region."

No funder of this project selects the reports to be reviewed or reviewers of reports, Welner said; he and Molnar do that.

The NEA, or its agent, certainly has every right to provide funding for professors so they can carry out a project they are sincerely eager to do anyway. But it also has every right to withdraw funding if it decides it doesn't care for the choices the professors make. And that's a problem.

Linda Seebach is an editorial writer for the Rocky. She can be reached by telephone at 303-954-2519 or by e-mail at seebach@RockyMountainNews.com.

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